Title: Lookup table
Post by Petra Weinakht on Oct 18th, 2008, 10:10am
Working on a large project that needed reference tables. I wanted to find the "standard"** value of an attribute and put it into the notes I was creating. I couldn't find explicit instructions on this (although I might not have looked hard enough) so I created my own method. With this, I can put a "key" into a note, lookup that key in a reference container, and grab the standard value of an attribute from the target note in the reference container. Here's a small example (Doing Lookups.tbx):

I'm sharing this because I find the technique quite useful in a highly structured document where QC is important, and it is also a nice adjunct to links.

My apologies if I am reinventing someone else's wheel.

Petra

**"Standard" has nothing to do with Tinderbox; it refers to my data. For example, element "H1" always is associated with the string "Published 1985 by Harper". Because I am analyzing a large number of texts, I wanted to make sure each of my bibliography references was always exactly correct. And, if I changed the string to "Published 1985 by Harper (2d Edition)" then all the notes with the "H1" key get updated also.

Title: Re: Lookup table
Post by Mark Anderson on Oct 18th, 2008, 11:20am
If by 'standard' you mean a user-set default, then when making a user attribute set the default to other than the app default. A default data attribute has a value of 'never' but this doesn't stop you setting an actual data as the default. A string is empty but you can give it a default value, etc.